First off, Happy Holidays everyone! We'll all be taking a short break while we enjoy the holidays but we might jump in every now and then to answers comments and such. I hope you all have a good time during the next several days and get lots of cool stuff!

Speaking of getting cool stuff, we here at Sam & Dan Games would like to give you guys a small gift of our own; the first release of HTD! Yay! Now you may have noticed the title "Pre-Alpha v0.001." This is pretty accurate. In other words this is like the very beginnings of HTD's physical form. For those of you who haven't been following the HTD's posts you might play this be wonder where the rest is. We've done a lot of stuff but as with most big projects the inital stage of development takes a lot of time in order to build the foundation and set things up for everything else to follow. You guys have been very helpful in that process with giving us feedback and we plan to continue asking for it every step of the way. This early release being one of those steps.

This version is basically just a demo survival map with some basic, core functions of the game. You have to protect the character with no armor (we don't have armor done for them yet :P) for as long as you can. Eventually you'll get overrun but it's a good testing ground for trying things out as we continue to add stuff. There are no profiles, leveling up, choosing skills, or manually triggering skills but they'll be coming soon.

While there isn't much there right now, this is our starting point, and from now on we'll be releasing updates for HTD as often as we can. There's a lot to come and we'll be asking the community for ideas and suggestions on a regular basis. Everything from quest ideas to weapon concepts to level designs. We have plenty of our own ideas but it's not like we can think of everything and having you guys help out is a great resource. Kevin's blog, KXN @ HTD is one way you can voice your opinion on such things. He puts up art related polls and asks for feedback on stuff he's currently working on as well as answers questions you guys might have for him.

So play around with this early release, see what you think, and let us hear your feedback in the comments! Have fun and Happy Holidays!

-Dan

Hey guys! It's been a long time coming but we are finally at the release for Hero Tower Defense! I'm pretty much going to repeat most of what Dan said! The game is really early, but I hope you guys can see what is there and use your imagination to see where the game is going to go. Some small things that aren't mentioned is that you can use the arrow keys to move the map and the "-" and "+" to zoom in and out. I wanted to thank Kevin (our artist) for doing such a great job! Thanks pal! I also want to thank Dan for answering all the SnD Coin emails and for taking over the design of HTD! ;P My family and girlfriend (they probably won't read this) but I thank them for all the support, letting me spend all this time on the computer! Lastly I want to thank you guys for such a great year, I say this a lot but I always mean it that without you guys we wouldn't be here right now releasing this game. I hope you guys have a good Christmas and New Years. See you guys in 2012!As always let us know what you think!-Sam

New Multiplayer Map - Multiplayer gets an upgrade, more paths, more choices.

New Achievements - Go back to older gyms and win special shadow pokemon.

New Level Cap to 72 - Getting close to 100!

New Mystery Gift Elf Avatar! - Thanks Kimmy Lube!

New Daily Gift Prizes! - Snd Coins and Shadow pokemon have been added to the prize list!

New Game Corner Prizes - Shadow Pokemon have been added to the prize list!

New Ability - Added Guts to the game, more will come in future updates.

Shadow Pokemon! - Added a shadow pokemon a new kind of rare pokemon to collect, exclusively available in the game corner and daily gift. They earn experience at a lower pace and can learn an exclusive TM Shadow Rush.

Hey guys! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I'm happy to say that almost everything has been added for this update. The layout will be coming this week along with the new features. Let's talk a little bit about Shadow Pokemon.

Shadow pokemon are meant to be like an anti-shiny. You can't catch them in the wild, you can't buy them with SnD coins and they get less experience per kill. You can get them by completing certain achievements, buying a random one in the game corner or winning one in the daily gift prize. This prevents them from being hackable and it also encourages trading any repeated shadow pokemon with other players. Many have been wondering which pokemon you can get in shadow form. Well pretty much any pokemon that you can get in the game will have a shadow version. This include shadow mew, raikou, entei, suicune, and victini! Also every shadow pokemon has the same chance of showing up. Many of you have asked for me to add new moves and different mechanics from the pokemon video games that came out with shadow pokemon but that was never my intent. These shadow pokemon are just special, they don't need to be cleansed... on this game... Also these pokemon retain their type and they have STAB with their original type. Their only shadow move "Shadow Rush" has the advantage of hitting every type as normal effectiveness.

Other than that this week is going to be about getting Hero Tower Defense out! Because of this my weekly progress will be about different things in HTD. So expect HTD to come out before the 25th and then the week after that I will be taking a break to just spend time with loved ones in bringing in the New Year.

I'll be fleshing out this list as the week goes on.

New Pokemon Center Layout and Features (70%)Trading my pokemon from my account samO (100%)Adding a new pokemon for trade (100%) - Shadow Victini!Finish the first HTD version (100%)

I hope you guys are enjoying your holiday break and as always let me know what you think and thanks for sticking by us!

Today I want to go over Native Skills (NS). I apologize in advance for all the abbreviations I'm about to use. :)

So what are NS? NS are skills that you start with and require no points. Each character will have one Native Elemental Skill (NES) and one Native Class Skill (NCS). There are 5 different NES, one for each elemental. The NES you end up with is determined by the character's native element. They are kind of like a racial traits but instead of being based on the character's race they are based on the character's native element instead. The NCS on the other hand is the same for every character. You'll see why in a moment.

All NES are ranged direct damage skills, there's no projectile and not based on your weapon, it just instantly hits. They all have a some sort of duration based effect (e.g. DoT, Buff, etc) and are stackable up to 5 times, each time increasing it's effects and renewing the duration. It's also worth noting that these skills can be used on allies as well. Also, NES are unique in that they are able to generate elemental charges around your character. These charges can be used various ways which I'll explain later.

As a reminder, attunements are a unit's resistance and effectiveness with each elemental's skills.

Now for the charges. For every NES use that character will receive a charge of that elemental type. So since the NES is linked to your native element it means that characater can only produce that type of charge. Every character can hold up to 5 charges each charge increases the characters attunement corresponding to the type of charge. So if it's a fire charge, it'll increase your fire attunement, etc. The charges are consumed by Finisher skills (FS). These skills require at least one charge but will consume whatever charges you currently have stored. Each charge will increase the FS power to varying degrees depending on the type of the FS and the type of the charges consumed. So for example, if you have 5 fire charges and you use a fire FS it's power will be boosted a lot. If you have 5 water charges and you use a fire FS you won't get much of a boost at all because water counters fire.

There's one FS with the exception to this rule and that's the NCS all classes start out with that I mentioned earlier. The NCS is a FS that lets you transfer whatever charges you have available to another unit. So now you can have a character with one native element holding the charges of another element, it just requires some team work. This also means that you can have a mix of charge types on a character since you can hold up to 5 charges.

This brings up one other point. Say you do a charge transfer and the receiving target goes over the limit of charges they can hold, or perhaps they already are full and you transfer for to them, what happens? Well, first it will check to see if there's any charge spots available and fill those then whatever are left will do a type check against the other elemental charges and either replace them or get countered. Here's a couple simple examples:

1. You transfer 5 water charges to a character with 5 fire charges - all the fire charges get replaced by the water charges. So the target ends up with all water charges.

2. You transfer 5 water charges to a character with 2 fire charges and 2 shadow charges - one water charge gets added, the two fire charges are replaced by two water charges while the 2 shadow charges remain because shadow counters water. So the target ends up with 3 water charges and 2 shadow charges.

I sounds more complicated than it actually is but these NS are meant to be important and used strategically and not just as a "Click skill, do damage" type of move. At the very beginning you'll be using them constantly just because you won't have many other moves to choose from but their importance will remain high throughout the game. This also allows for some interesting stuff to do with strategies for general attacks, boss encounters, level objectives, etc so expect to see some fun things going on in the future.

Well that was a bit long but fun to write! On a side note we're all working hard to have as much ready for the upcoming release as possible. However, I've said it before and I'll say it again just to keep everyone on the same page. This release is basically a prototype of what we have physically developed so far. Design and concept is the majority of what we've been doing so far and so we've only just begun to start physically developing the game into something. But we promised to give you guys something as soon as possible and we want to hear your feedback every step of the way so we're showing you what's essentially a just-started, pre-alpha, v0.0001, right-out-of-the-gates release. So just keep that in mind please. :D

Kevin also has a new poll up on his blog, KXN @ HTD for choosing Male Hairstyles so head over there and be sure to cast your vote!

As always, let us hear what you have to say in the comments and thanks!

Hey guys, nice to see you again! Do you come here often? Anyways.. enough small talk, let's get straight to the action! I've received a lot of good feedback for the new level and new achievement, so I'm glad you guys enjoyed that. The closer we get to New Years and Christmas the harder it is to complete updates. So many presents to buy, so many games to play, and events to go to! But don't worry here at Sam and Dan Games we won't let you down, even if things come out a little late, they will arrive!

This week we will be doing a new multiplayer map that will replace the old one. Because let's be honest the old one is LAME! So I hope you guys will enjoy it. Along with that will come the new layout for the Pokemon Center that I think a lot of you will enjoy, it's been a long time coming but thanks to Velocity, we have it ready to go and should be up this week. Along with the new layout we will have new improvements, using magical technologies like AJAX (Google it, if you are curious), you will be able to see what the user requested for his trade without having to leave the search results page. On top of that I will adding other features that have been asked for a lot during our time here.

ON TOP OF THAT! We will have new daily gift prizes, new game corner prizes, new abilities, new achievements and new level cap!

Change Seaking's attack in Route 12 from Soak to Aqua Ring to prevent flying pokemon from being able to go in the flying only spots (100%) Added the Ability Keen Eye to Hitmonchan (100%) Fix issue with Shadow pokemon showing up as shiny when learning a new move or evolving (100%) - Thanks everybody that let me know :)Lowering the amount of energy the attacker gets in the multiplayer map (100%)

PTD First look is below! Check it out!

That's what we have for now, let me know what you think and keep coming back to see our progress and PTD First Look by Graphic Force. Thanks!

So for this post I'm going to take a small break from posting a game progress update in order to ask you guys a question.

We definitely have a lot of ideas for HTD and you guys have given us a lot of help with those ideas. You've also given us some great new ideas as well. This is all very helpful to us and even though the first version of the game will basically be at the prototype, pre-alpha, v0.01 stage in development we look forward to hearing your feedback on that as well. This will just help us a lot because you'll be able to get your hands on it and tell us what you like or dislike right from the beginning while the game is still wide open for changes.

This is all to say that your comments, suggestions, ideas, and feedback in general is very useful to us. In a past post I asked what game references you guys might like to see in the game and I found those suggestions to be quite helpful and ended up with a large list of good suggestions. So I wanted to call upon our fans again and ask you guys to think of some game mechanics that either you've thought of yourself or you've seen elsewhere and then pick one that you'd really like to see in HTD. For example, something like siege weapons that you can build and place like towers or maybe housing for your characters, etc. Just try to limit it to one suggestion though because I know a lot of you have a bunch of ideas but give me the one game mechanic you want the most. Also try to think about how it'll work in HTD's TD/RPG gameplay. It's ok if it's already been mentioned before because nothing is 100% at this point and things can always change. Plus, if lots of people want the same thing then this will let us know.

So let us hear your suggestion/idea for your most wanted game mechanic in the comments. I look forward to reading your responses! Also, Kevin has a new poll up on his blog, KXN @ HTD for choosing Male Hairstyles so head over there and cast your vote!

Removed Shiny Horsea that are hacked, and then adding Shiny Horsea for adoption

First version of Multiplayer - First map, premade teams, can't change moves, randomly either attack or defend, attackers win if they carry the old rod back. Attackers have 1000 energy to use. Defenders win if they don't let the attacker carry the old rod back and the attacker is out of energy. Winning or losing has no rewards or penalties.

Put a new pokemon up for trade on my Account samO - Shiny Horsea is now up for trade on my samO account!

Added new moves to the Pokemon Center Move List

Removed odd looking reflection on pokeball on the main menu - It looked funny, ;)

WE MADE IT! Well almost... Multiplayer v1 is now up and ready to play. But I will be the first to say that while it's okay it's nowhere near what it should be. The reality is that one week is not enough to build a multiplayer feature. The fact that I got it working to this point is really a miracle. Just to make an example the first version of PTD took me 5 months of work on and off to just have about 11 pokemon, even less moves, level cap at 10, and only 3 levels. Multiplayer is a whole other beast, you have to deal with latency, match making, trying to keep the games in sync. Instead of saying hey it's not done please wait another week, I got to a good stopping point and released it as it was. So the way I see it multiplayer can only get better. But I've had worries about being able to keep it up for free and for all players. Well.. I have good news!

Thanks to our great sponsor we will be able to have free multiplayer for everybody! With one condition! That the multiplayer is exclusive to his website. So while you can still play here for the story mode, and challenge mode, the multiplayer will take you to the playtowerdefense.com website to play there. A small price to pay for getting your multiplayer for free!

In other news, like you guys know I always enjoy hearing from you guys and letting you guys experience the content as soon as possible. My friend GraphicForce suggested an idea of having a preview youtube video of what the weekly update will have, and I agreed. So each week GraphicForce will make a video previewing whatever is new on the update for that week before the update comes out. Click here to see the first PTD First Look!

In other other news, you guys decided what I should work on this week! The winners are story mode level and more achievements. So let's start there.

Version 5.2 is now available in the blog, with new mystery gift avatar and apk,swf,exe v5.2.1 coming out on Monday! Enjoy!

Story Mode Level (100%) - After saving Meowth and defeating Sabrina you must now train against your past opponents. Can you get past them?

New Achievements (100%)New Mystery Gift (100%)New Pokemon up for trade on my account samO (0%)Deciding who will get my Shiny Horsea from trade (0%)Adding new moves into pokemon center move list (100%)Fix abilities text being messed up when you pause the game (100%)It is no longer possible to have space or special characters in the avatar chat room (100%)It is no longer possible to have 2 people with the same name in the avatar chat room (100%)The chat will no longer scroll automatically if you have scrolled up to read something, if you are scrolled all the way down the chat will still scroll automatically (100%)Making multiplayer point to the PlayTowerDefense Website (100%)Creating a new database to hold user data, the current ones are getting filled (0%)

I will keep updating the blog with the progress so keep coming back for more. As always let me know what you think! Top 10 questions will come back for next week.

Alright, in this weeks post I want go into weapons and how they may differ from eachother.

In HTD we plan to have many different types of weapons that players can choose from to fit their style. These, of course, won't all be available right at the first release but we'll be releasing more and more as we continue with development. The term "weapons" in this case also includes things like shields and trinkets that you can hold. There will be one-hand and two-hand versions of all nearly all the different types of weapons. I say "nearly all" because there are some exceptions like shields which are usually only one-handed and polearms which are typically only two-handed.

The weapons will be broken up into a few general categories and than branch from there. Here's a list of what we're thinking for some of those categories with their type of weapons:

Light Melee: lighter and faster, close-range weapons

- Daggers, Shortswords, Small Axes and Maces, etc

Heavy Melee: heavier and slower, close-range weapons

- Polearms, Longswords, Large Axes and Maces, etc

Light Ranged: lighter and faster, long-range weapons

- Bows, Small Guns and Throwing Weapons, etc

Heavy Ranged: heavier and slower, long-range weapons

- Crossbows, Large Guns and Throwing Weapons, etc

Fist: Varying sizes and speeds, close-range weapons

- Knuckledusters, Bos (Sam: What's a bos?), etc

(Bos - It's a super secret weapon! :) No, actually I guess the plural version is actually just Bo, aka Bō. Like a Bo Staff and other stick weapons.)

Magical: Varying sizes and speeds, long-range weapons

- Wands, Staves, etc

Light Shields: Smaller and lighter, off-hand weapons

- Bucklers, Heater Shields, etc

Heavy Shields: Larger and heavier, off-hand weapons

- Kite Shields, Tower Shields, etc

Trinkets: Various sized, off-hand weapons

- Scrolls, Books, Magical Globes, etc

The weapons in each of these categories is affected by certain character stats differently. For example, Heavy Melee Weapons will benefit from high Strength and some Dexterity whereas Magical Weapons will rely mostly on Intelligence and only a little on Dexterity.

Another thing is we'll probably have equipment slots for 1H/2H Close-range Weapons, 1H/2H Long-range Weapons and your character may swap between them automatically depending on the distance of the closest enemy. So if there's an enemy unit coming towards your warrior character he won't just be sitting there waiting for the unit to come within melee range. Instead he'll auto-switch to his ranged weapon and use that till it gets closer or another enemy gets closer. This also helps prevent your warrior character from just getting out-ranged by an enemy unit that is attacking him constantly from a distance.

We're also thinking about having weapons be a bit customizable in some way so you can gear it more towards your character's style. Things like tradeskills will certainly provide some other possibilities as well. Either way, we'll have tons of weapons eventually and any suggestions you guys make will be helpful as always. Even some of your own designs could certianly make it into the game and would help Kevin out greatly.

Speaking of Kevin, check out his blog, KXN @ HTD to see some additional HTD art and be sure to participate in any polls he has going because that helps us know what you guys want first. Also here's a fitting image of some weapons:

HTD Weapons

Be sure to leave use any feedback and suggestions you guys might have, it's greatly appreciated and very helpful to us, thanks!